Best Diet and Nutrition Apps

Eat Healthier with These Apps

Summer has arrived, and with the beach and vacation season at hand, you may be more focused than ever on healthy eating. Your smartphone can play a roll in keeping your diet on the straight and narrow: Check out these excellent diet and nutrition trackers that help you shop for healthy food, log your nutrition intake and help you pick and choose a healthy diet plan. With a little discipline and some digital assistance, you too can sculpt the perfect beach bod.

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Fooducate (Android, iOS: Free)

Fooducate (Android, iOS) helps you shop and eat healthy by allowing you to quickly pull up nutritional information about food products from barcodes, as well as by helping you make sense of nutritional labels. The app displays a letter grade from A to D, along with a quick summary of nutrition information in plain language, as well as healthy alternative suggestions. If users cook their own meals or eat out, you can also manually enter a meal's nutritional information. In addition, the app also doubles as an intake, calorie and exercise tracker. A pro subscription removes ads and unlocks additional features.

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Shopwell (Android, iOS: Free)

The first step to eating well is shopping well. At least that's the idea behind Shopwell (Android, iOS), a barcode scanning and shopping assistant app that rates foods and grocery items according to your nutritional needs. ShopWell users create a personalized profile and select from a series of nutritional goals (Heart Disease, Athletic Training, etc), as well as dietary restrictions (Celiac disease, food allergies, vegetarian, etc.). The app then takes these into account and uses them to score scanned grocery items, as well as provide layman-friendly nutritional pointers, and healthy suggestions.

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Nutrients (iOS: $4.99)

Formerly known as Foodle, Nutrients provides users with a rich database containing nutritional information for a wide variety of meals and ingredients. Users can search for specific foods or ingredients and view a breakdown of its important nutritional content, or they can instead choose a particular nutrient, like Vitamin C or Potassium, and then find foods that are loaded with what they're looking for (citrus fruits or bananas, for example). Users can even create custom recipes with a mix of ingredients, or view data or search from an Apple Watch app.

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Lifesum (Android, iOS: Free)

Rather than aim for a simple, cut-and-dried accounting of every calorie and macronutrient you ingest, Lifesum (Android, iOS) aims to help you build a healthy lifestyle, with plans for losing weight, gaining muscle mass or maintaining a healthy body. Users choose a fitness plan that's right for them, and then record exercise, water and food intake manually or with a bar code scanner; the app gives you feedback and recommendations based on fitness goals. Users can view their fitness and eating habits over time, as well as health tips and reminders to get enough food or water. Lifesum Premium subscriptions provide users with more specialized diet plans, as well as more detailed nutrition breakdowns for food, as well as in-app integration with a variety of fitness trackers and smart devices.

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Sparkpeople Weight Loss Diet & Calorie Counter (Android, iOS: Free)

Sparkpeople's Weight Loss Diet & Calorie Counter app (Android, iOS) is a total fitness app, calorie counter and exercise guide with a wealth of tools and integration with Sparkpeople's fitness and healthy living user community. The app includes a calorie counter with a rich library of more than 4 million food items, complete with a barcode scanner for easy entry as well as exercise demos. A workout log makes it easy to record your exercises, including sets, reps, and weight/rep. A gamified system of SparkPoints rewards tracking and healthy habits, and you can use SparkPoints to send virtual gifts to other users. In addition to the built-in tools, the Sparkpeople app integrates with various fitness trackers and devices.

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Noom Coach (Android, iOS: Freemium, $60/month)

Noom Coach (Android, iOS) is another app that focuses on building healthy habits in order to build a healthy body. The free tier provides users with food and exercise logging options and an in-app pedometer, but the real gold is in Noom Coach's customised premium plans that provide daily goals and personalized coaching to help you achieve your fitness goals. The app's dashboard puts your daily tasks and activities front and center with challenges and feedback designed to build healthy habits, rather than just unsustainable weight crashes that you'll rebound from in no time.

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MyPlate Calorie Tracker (Android, iOS: Free)

Livestrong.com's MyPlate Calorie Tracker (Android, iOS) is a versatile calorie tracker and nutrition app that makes it easy to log your food intake and and track your consumption habits as you progress toward your health goals over time. The app comes with a comprehensive database of more than 2 million different food items, with a barcode scanner for easy logging of prepackaged food, as well as a tool for creating custom meal items. Users can track intake of calories and a variety of macro and micronutrients, as well as their water intake. The app also doubles as an exercise log, complete with Google Fit and Apple HealthKit integration and support for a variety of wearables.

John Corpuz flip-flopped between computer science and creative writing courses in school. As a contributor to Tom's Guide he's found a happy middle ground writing about apps, mobile gaming and other geekery.